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let's remember our history and what the founder said David Jones, creative Director and founder of Realtime Worlds .

You’ve showed characters carjacking, being chased and ultimately being arrested, but that’s not the entire APB experience, is it? No. We have many, many different things you can do. So that was a car chase. We have on-foot chases – a game’s not really done it well before. And it’s not just about trying to kill the other guy. We have arrest mechanics in there; we have witness mechanics in there so you can actually stay back and witness people doing wrong things. You can be quite stealthy in the game. There are loads of mechanics and when real people understand them, they’ll be able to concoct all these different scenarios and become very sneaky. You may think you’ve made sure there’s nobody around before you commit a crime, but you’d be surprised how sneaky people can be. It just introduces the kind of stuff AI could never do because people are damn smart.

And that’s what’s really emerging for me from the game – like setting roadblocks in advance. People get to know other people in this game and they go: “I know this guy’s routes. I know where he likes to drive.” And we’ve got voice-over-IP, so you’ve got one guy going: “I’ll go down the street – tell me when he’s coming and I’ll quickly nip out in front of him.” It’s stuff that, in terms of AI, you’d probably make a whole game out of that and it would be the big selling feature of the game, but it just pales into insignificance compared to real people doing all that stuff. So when we say players as content, we mean as the game content. As well as creating content, I mean that’s a big part of it, but it’s really about them being the core of the game.

You’ve said that APB could be played in singleplayer, but it’d still be an MMOG, yes? Yeah. There’s no kind of singleplayer storyline. You can go in and say, “Well, I want to become the number one person – because celebrity’s a big thing about the game,” or, “I want to achieve the highest ever threat rating,” or, “I want the most kills ever on this server, and I’m just going to do it solo.” There are lots of what I call anti-social online gamers [laughs]. So it caters to everyone.

You’ve said that, when you formed Realtime, you built a relationship with Microsoft to get ‘next-gen console experience’ – aren’t you throwing that away by making APB for PC? No. I mean, there’s a lot of next-gen stuff in terms of graphics, pipelines and technology. It’s just not next-gen console, it’s next-gen gaming. At some point I’d like it to be applicable to console. We’ve always said that. We haven’t made any decisions, but it would be great at some point. If APB’s a success, obviously that’s one of the first things. It’s the kind of game that would work well on console but we’re just not at that stage yet. First of all we’ve got to make it a success, and understand what people love about it, understand what things would change if we wanted to go console, if anything, and then take it from there.

G 1 implemented the game on the console PS4 and XBox

New Hybrid Skill Rating System In order to create more-balanced PvP gameplay, APB Reloaded is transitioning from a straight win-loss system to a skill-based hybrid rating system, sourced from several proven skill rating algorithms such as ELO and Glicko. This new skill-based hybrid rating system aims to better reflect all gamers' actual skill levels when compared to the opponents they defeat.

"From the start of the development of APB Reloaded last fall our focus has been to remove obstacles preventing players from having fun. While our development and design teams have done an amazing job improving driving, shooting, skill ratings, witnessing and other key elements of the game, I am also thrilled with the changes slated to be released during the latter part of open beta," said Bjorn Book-Larsson, Chief Operating Officer for GamersFirst and CEO of Reloaded Productions Ltd. "We expect APB Reloaded to set a new bar for what is possible to achieve in a free to play MMO game, and the open beta represents another big step in that direction."

Eurogamer: Presumably you're having to talk them out of the rules that they have, because you've got to have your own server technology.

David Jones: Absolutely. So it has to be something that everybody wants to do, where everybody's clear on what we can do and what we can't do. So there are a lot of issues like that where we said, let's just make one, make it great, get all the issues out of the way. It'll also need a fair bit of redesign as well I think.

Eurogamer: A lot of the things I've read and heard about APB are fun moment-to-moment systems: customisation, the notoriety system, the dynamic match-making that gives players missions to fight each other. But what's the long-term goal for your players? Even Call of Duty has experience and levelling now. Even an action game has to have that.

David Jones: And we do. Every player has a rating, and I've seen players with a rating of 200-plus. And that surprises me because that is one of those stats that shows how much of the game they've consumed. How many contacts they've successfully worked for, how many items they've unlocked in the game.

We have daily, weekly, monthly leagues for many, many things in the game. And you have the traditional things like kill-to-death ratios, the most cars stolen, for Enforcers how many people they've arrested. Arresting is an interesting mechanic for Enforcers because they can just kill people within a mission, but they can also arrest them. It's quite a bit harder to do, but for some very organised clans, as you can imagine, that's a very prestigious league to win. And the rewards scale based upon those leagues. It's very competitive. clans and gold players play in bronze district . solo game is disabled participate in team Alliance for an open mission . Team Alliance attempts to group multiple team together when standard missions . NOTE: if you are a solo player , this is the default behaviour and cannot be disabled .

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Was still undeniably bad for overall morale amongst the legit playerbase. Seeing certain people back was definitely depressing, like Ashley for instance.

Because the legitimate playerbase has had to endure the cheater issue for so long that literally anything that includes the word cheater is immeduately being frowned upon with no patience whatsoever. You can thank old G1 and Tiggs for creating such an environment by poorly actioning cheaters with absolutely zero consistency and no clear policy regarding both banning and unbanning.

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Having no new content to offer, what else could they do to boost population when they acquired G1?

... just a thought.

cmon cookie ... you make it sound like they can't add 2+2.

If you release all the worst scums and your "hype train" is based on releasing all hackers and scammers...
Then who are you gonna attract back to your game? ... yes, ofc .. the majority of the ex-banned hackers and scammers...

Do cheaters stop cheating just cuz they get a 2nd chance, like rly? rly rly? has anyone ever had that experience? lol

Look at population numbers... if their idea was to grow APB via releasing the worst ppl and advertising them to "come back", then you end up with a game where you can't even barely fill 1 fin and 1 wf district on a weekend evening..

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If you release all the worst scums and your "hype train" is based on releasing all hackers and scammers...
Then who are you gonna attract back to your game? ... yes, ofc .. the majority of the ex-banned hackers and scammers...

Do cheaters stop cheating just cuz they get a 2nd chance, like rly? rly rly? has anyone ever had that experience? lol

Look at population numbers... if their idea was to grow APB via releasing the worst ppl and advertising them to "come back", then you end up with a game where you can't even barely fill 1 fin and 1 wf district on a weekend evening..

I kinda think that only those that had been playing the whole time stayed.

I dont think there were any cheaters who quit when banned, but started again and kept playing after the unbans... even fewer who did that and kept cheating.